Other than that I'm loving Mate. Unity and Gnome3... like someone came in an rearranged your stuff, hid some things, just being plain annoying and saying "but isn't it prettier and more efficient?" No I have my stuff how I like it, stop fracking with it!

I agree! That's why I moved to Linux Mint. I have Mate, XFCE and Cinammon installed on my laptop in three seperate partitions. I just deleted my Windows 7 partition which I never used. Not sure what to do with the now empty partition.

I am also running Puppy Linux 5.2.8 from DVD. I love this OS as well.

I am toying around with IceWM, Fluxbox, and Openbox. Not sure how intense it is to configure these Window managers. You see I come from the Mac side (since 1988), but am really loving Linux. I hardly use my 24" iMac anymore.

I have upgraded from mate 1.2 to 1.4 following the instructions on this post, first week it worked good, only issue was a pc freeze or crash, but only once, on the second week the pc gave me a kernel panic and a couple of issues I didn't had with mate 1.2, so I got fed up, backed up my files and made the painfull job of reinstalling linuxmint again, so my advice to linux newbies or anyone else who might be interested in upgrading to mate 1.4 following this post, is to wait for linuxmint developers to made it available through update manager or prepare yourself to do a little work restoring your pc like it was before P.S. I want to make clear i'm not blamming anyone I did the upgrade @ my own risk, just a little advice for you folks!